Hi, all
I found this forum and thought it might be able to help me. I always have trouble talking to people about how I feel and writing things down always makes me feel better so I think maybe this will help me combine the two things in a way.
I have had problems with social anxiety and depression for many years (I am 26 now) and have been taking Cipralex after finally admitting I had a problem last august. I have had counselling due to problems at work but I can’t afford anymore as I am on such low wages.
Last april, not long after finishing my councilling and feeling a bit more at ease I met a girl for the first time. My problem has always stopped me making relationships with anyone at all as I struggle so much to engage with anyone and often felt paranoid and “different” to other people. The girl I met changed everything. She had made me so happy and really given me hope for the first time in my life. I finally began to feel like I could change for the better. We live in different towns but only 15 minutes on the train so things are almost long distance but not quite. We have been getting on really well for about 3 months and them things started to go wrong.
We have both been having problems at work, though mine are not job threatening. My girl’s have become so bad over the last month, she has been having trouble sleeping and punching the wall at work and crying a lot. This started to spill over into our relationship more and more and made some of the issues we are having worse.
She can be very quick to anger sometimes, I think she knows this, and occaisionally loses her rag at quite small things. I began to get quite paranoid about upsetting her and started to feel like I would do anything to avoid conflict even to the point of keeping secret how upset I was sometimes. We had one row in late july, aggravated by alcohol and things have just carried on getting worse since. I have just felt more and more guarded about my feelings and cautious and she has obviously noticed. Finally, just about a week ago, she had a breakdown at work and has been prescribed fluoxetine for depression.
She has seemed more down and reserved at times over the last week and kept saying how weird and strange she felt, like she didn’t care about anything or anyone. She asked me on Sunday if things were different between us, but couldn’t really say how. This Monday, she phoned me and said we needed to do “something” about us. I said we should probably just break up and have regretted it ever since.
I had felt so defeated and downtrodden lately that I wrote an email to her saying I felt better that everything was out in the open and that it was probably for the best. She told me once once that she thought she liked me more than I liked her and this is half the problem. I don’t know if this is entirely untrue. She is more impulsive and very much someone who goes with their heart, whereas I am more reserved and go with my head. Unfortunately my head is full of doubts and fear and sometimes these take over. During the last month I began to feel like I was as miserable on Cipralex as I was off it and that I should give up taking it. I started to wean the dose down from 10mg to 5mg at about the same time my girl went on her fluoxetine. I started to feel paranoid and fearful even more than before, but couldn’t tell her because I didn’t want to scare her off taking her own pills with stories of my side effects. Now everything is screwed up, I feel so miserable and I may well have thrown away the best thing that ever happened to me.
I have put myself back up to 10mg of Cipralex, it was a truly stupid thing to do to try and cut down when I did but I had been happy before then and genuinely thought I could start to come off them. I can’t take back what I said about the difference in attraction between us either. All I know is this. I still have feelings for her. The attraction and affection was always genuine and is still there. It just got lost, the bad times caught up with me and began to wipe out the memory of the brilliant times we used to have together. Now all I can think about is the fun we used to have together and how much I miss her. I have been trying to talk to her, mostly by email, about how I feel but she says that what was there between us has been “ruined” and that she won’t be anything more than friends. Only last week we laughed so much together we cried and she said she might even love me.
I feel so lost right now. I want to keep telling her how much I care about her but I don’t want to make things any worse than I have done. I know she is probably not thinking straight because of the fluoxetine but a part of me has this horrible doubt that she really has made her mind up that nothing I say or do can change anything.
I don’t know what to do anymore.